Dead Time

by Stephen White

  I explained about the canceled game at Shea.

  “That’s good, right?” she asked. “That Jonas is comfortable there? That he wants to be there?”

  “Yeah. That’s good. I still don’t trust Marty. But I’m liking Kim more every time I talk with her.”

  A few moments later, seconds after we had ended the call, I realized that I had still not told Lauren that I had been in touch with Merideth in New York. I convinced myself that it was because the contact was, in the grand scheme, unimportant. Telling her I’d seen my ex would only raise the contact to a level of importance it didn’t deserve.

  Had I been one of my own patients, as a therapist I would have reflected aloud that were rationalization an art, that particular effort deserved to be hanging at MoMA.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I gave Haji the Mets tickets and spent a quiet weekend walking the city, visiting neighborhoods that I hadn’t visited before. NoLIta was my new favorite. Harlem was a close second—I was having some remorse about not choosing one of the sublets there. The summer exodus of residents from the city had reduced weekend traffic on the city’s sidewalks. I promised myself I would revisit my new favorites on a day when the streets were teeming.

  Although I had left messages both at his home and on his cell phone, Sam Purdy didn’t return my latest call until Sunday afternoon.

  When he finally got back to me—I hadn’t been certain he would—I was sitting in the shade outside a coffeehouse in what I thought was the Meatpacking District, drinking iced chai. The day was hot, but the humidity was tolerable, at least for the moment. I was guessing I had about ten more minutes before the movement of the sun across the southern arc of the sky would make a mockery of my shady spot and compel me to retreat. The other two outdoor tables enjoyed more protected shade than mine did, but the occupants appeared to have long-term plans for their real estate.

  Caller ID read PAY PHONE. The subterfuge of using public phones was a habit that Sam and I developed during our crime spree, one that was apparently dying hard for him. We had started out in our mutual lawbreaking with misdemeanors. The call camouflage was continuing, I suspected, because we had graduated to felonies.

  “Sam,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I’ve been on the road with Simon.” Simon was Sam’s son.

  Sam was hoping I’d endorse the fiction that the reason he hadn’t returned my call was because he wasn’t able to drive and talk on the phone simultaneously. I granted him the invention. It’s what friends do.

  “Just got back from driving him to Minnesota.” Sam held the long o sound of the penultimate syllable for two extra beats. One of the two additional beats was residue of his northern Minnesota heritage; the other was an intentional exaggeration of his accent for my benefit. “He’s going to spend a few weeks out there with all his grandparents and cousins. See some family, do some fishing. Canoeing, too.”

  When Sam said “canoeing,” it came out “c’n-oo-in.” The word didn’t even resemble a gerund. “Kid needs to get up close and personal with some real mosquitoes. Not the wimpy things that show up around here in July and August.”

  Sam and his ex were both from Minnesota—Sam from the far north, the Iron Range. They knew from lakes and fishing and canoeing—okay, c’n-oo-in—and they knew from mosquitoes masquerading as hummingbirds.

  “Simon’s good, Sam?”

  Simon was good. His dream to spend the summer at a hockey camp in Vancouver that cost more per month than the sticker price of his father’s first car was one of the casualties of Sam’s job suspension. The trip north to hang with relatives in Minnesota was Simon’s consolation prize.

  Sam had no way to know that I was in New York with Jonas. I doubted that he knew about Lauren’s Dutch child or that Lauren and Grace were on a quixotic adventure to connect with unlikely extended family in Amsterdam.

  In so many ways, Amsterdam was not Sam’s kind of city. I did think that if I could drag him through town with blinders on—literal blinders, so he would fail to notice the coffee shops and the red-light district—I could get him addicted to rijsttafel after one or two courses.

  I brought him up to speed on my family’s goings-on, my trip to New York to be close to Jonas, and the girls’ jaunt to Europe. It took a few minutes. He digested the revelations about Lauren’s past in stride. Where sexual indiscretion was concerned, Sam felt he was the blackest pot on the hearth, and he was not about to disparage anyone else’s charred kettle.

  As we talked, the sun’s rays marched relentlessly across the tabletop, threatening to consume me in their fire.

  Our conversation was the kind of chat that good friends have. Sam and I were conspiring to ignore the relationship elephant in the room. The elephant was the fact that in the wake of an ultimate act of friendship the previous spring, we had been having great difficulty acting like friends.

  Processing relationship dynamics with Sam had never been an easy thing for me—he was a reluctant participant in any activity that approached the intentionally introspective. I wasn’t about to risk ruining the first few minutes of our only conversation in a long time by insisting that he confront the distance that had infiltrated our friendship.

  “You holding up?” I asked him when an opportunity appeared to refocus the conversation on him. Sam’s six-month unpaid suspension was a little more than half over. He had failed to notify his police superiors that he had been sexually involved with the victim of a hit-and-run case he had been investigating. That the victim was another police officer had complicated things for Sam considerably. As did the fact that he had a girlfriend at the time.

  In reply to my direct question, he maintained that he was doing, “Good. Good.” The second “good” pretty much erased any inclination I might have had to accept the fragile sincerity of the first. I asked how his trip to California to breakup with Carmen—the aforementioned girlfriend—had gone.

  “How the fu—” he sputtered before he said, “Come on, how do you think?”

  He didn’t want an answer. That was probably why I gave him one. “I would imagine it was difficult, and painful.”

  He laughed. “This is the point when I’m supposed to tell you how much I’ve missed you, right? That it’s so much fun being buddies with a shrink?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He gave me a chance to defy him. I didn’t. To reward my restraint, he said, “Wise.”

  “I’ve missed you, Sam.”

  He allowed me a moment to get ready for what he was going to say next. “We need to be careful, Alan. There are people in the department who see the convenience of what happened…on that ranch in Frederick. Someone could still put the pieces together.”

  I didn’t plan to argue that point with him. Frederick, Colorado, was the site of the violent death of a woman who had it in for our families, Sam’s and mine. Her death had not been serendipity—it had been preemptive self-defense on our part. Mostly Sam’s. On the way to that secret finale, Sam and I had created fresh enemies in Boulder law enforcement—people who would take great satisfaction tying us to the woman’s death, one the medical examiner had, for the present, called a suicide.

  I said, “We can’t pretend we’re not friends, Sam. That looks suspicious too.”

  “We need to be wise.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Merideth called a few days ago, Sam. She—”

  “You told Merideth you’re in New York?” He almost coughed out the words. That was how surprised he was.

  Sam wasn’t much for gossip, but he could recognize the raw materials when they were strewn out in front of him. He also knew me well enough to know that getting in touch with Merideth was so far down my usual to-do list that it would be difficult for someone to spot without binoculars. “No, I didn’t. But she called me, I answered, and she knows I’m here. She was in tears.”

  “You went to her rescue?”

  He said it in a way that made me want
to tell him, “It’s not like that.” But I knew if I argued it wasn’t like that, it would sound like it was like that.

  I said, “She wants to know if you’re interested in some work.”

  The relentless assault of the sun had consumed the tabletop and begun inching up my thighs. My chair was pushed back against the brick wall. If I didn’t stand up, the sun’s heat would soon poach my testicles in scrotal sweat. I stuck a couple of bucks under my glass and conceded my territory.

  I began to cross the street because most of the shade was on the other side. Sam was silent while I was on the move, apparently considering something.

  “You still there? I lose you?” I asked. I had completed half my jaywalk, pausing so an off-duty cab could speed by.

  “What kind of work? I don’t do security.”

  Security? That caused me to wonder what Sam had been up to during his suspension from the police department. “Looking into an old…case she’s interested in. Talking to some people. Things you do every day. Things you’re good at.”

  “Detective stuff?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m not a PI.”

  “She’s looking for something more…informal. That’s my sense, anyway.”

  “Money is kind of tight,” he mused.

  Sam was convincing himself of something. I offered him an alternative. “I can help with money, Sam.”

  He ignored me. He asked, “Is this for her TV job? She’s looking for a consultant? Like for a story?”

  From his inflection I couldn’t tell if Sam thought whether working as a consultant for a national TV news producer would be intriguing or inane. But it was clear that I had not been creative enough to recognize how easily Merideth and Sam were going to finesse the details of the arrangement she was contemplating—specifically, how they would get around the whole PI licensing problem that looked so imposing to me.

  Sam spied the opening in the fabric of the ethical/legal fence immediately.

  If Sam was interested in the work she was proposing, and if Merideth continued to think he was the best person to help her, I didn’t want to screw things up between them. I decided to get out of the middle. I said, “I think I’ll let you get in touch and you guys can decide what your role would be.”

  “What do you know already, Alan? I can tell you know stuff. You’re dying to tell me something.”

  I sat down on the first step of a concrete stoop that was directly across the street from a nineteenth-century building covered with a visual cacophony of graffiti. The narrow building—remnants of a pulley system protruding below an ornate cornice convinced me that it had once been a warehouse—was wallpapered with volunteer art. Not one of its surfaces, vertical or horizontal, was spared decoration. Graphic things. Geometric things. Serene things. Obscene things. Some of it was…trash. Random trash, angry trash. But some of it was good. Captivating.

  A sign announcing imminent redevelopment hung over a second-story window. The sign had not been painted over.

  The adjacent buildings were all graffiti-free. It was as though the taggers and the neighborhood property owners had agreed that only the old warehouse would be defaced.

  While I appreciated the artistic panoply, I gave Sam an outline of what I’d learned about the Grand Canyon thing. About Jaana and Eric, and about Carmel.

  “Huh,” he said, not exactly tipping his hand.

  “Do you know her parents, Sam? The Poteets? Wallace and Cassandra?”

  “He’s a shrink? I wouldn’t know him unless I met him with you. Maybe I arrested him once. Where do they live?”

  “Shanahan Ridge. Not too far below NCAR.” I said N-CAR, not N-C-A-R. Sam knew I was talking about the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. I. M. Pei had designed the complex to evoke an Anasazi ruin. NCAR sits on a high plateau above the southwest tip of Boulder on what is probably the finest single piece of real estate in the county, maybe even the finest parcel in the whole eastern side of the state.

  Sam said, “I can’t tell from your story—did you end up talking to their daughter? What? Carmel?”

  “Yeah, it’s Carmel. Cara. But no, I haven’t spoken with her, and I’m not sure I’ll get the chance.” I explained the situation with Wallace and Cassandra, and their concern about revisiting the Grand Canyon trip with their daughter.

  “There’s no crime here, right? You’re not leaving something out of the story? This isn’t police work? I can’t…do that.”

  “I’ve only seen media reports Merideth provided from the time the woman disappeared, Sam. There’s no mention of a crime in any of them. Everything I’ve read makes what happened sound like a disappearance, maybe an accident.”

  “No body?”

  “Nobody?” I asked, confused.

  “Not ‘nobody.’ No corpus. That kind of ‘no body.’”

  “Not that, either. Not according to what I’ve seen.”

  A kid whizzed around the corner on a motorized scooter and stopped fifteen feet past the stoop. The minuscule motor on the scooter was belching blue smoke and whining like a baby with colic. The kid—I guessed he was twelve or thirteen—had stopped in the direct glare of the sun and seemed immune to its power to melt flesh. He kept glancing my way as he tinkered with the motor. I thought he was stalling while he decided whether the reason I was hanging in his neighborhood was something that merited his attention.

  Sam said, “Sure, why the hell not? I’ll give Merideth a call. See what she has in mind. With Simon gone I can use the distraction. Got her number?”

  I gave him Merideth’s mobile number. I added, “She can be difficult.”

  “I think I can handle it. I’m not calling her for her company.”

  “She’s changed, Sam. Grown up.” I recognized my ambivalence—I’d gone from warning Sam about my ex one minute, to defending her the next. There wasn’t a particularly compelling rationale for either inclination.

  “Doesn’t matter a whit to me,” he said. “I hardly knew the woman before she was new and improved.”

  Jonas’s uncle Marty called my mobile less than an hour later as I was climbing out of the subway station on my way to Murray Hill. I had to scamper up the long flight of stairs to get a strong enough signal to use my phone. My heart was racing. Not from the exertion of the climb, but because the call was so unexpected.

  Marty hadn’t called me once since I’d arrived in New York.

  Tell me Jonas is okay. Tell me! “Marty. You there? Can you hear me?”

  “Alan. Yeah, yeah. Fine.”

  “What’s up? Is Jonas okay?”

  “Jonas? Great. Listen…um. We should talk. I’ll be taking the train into the city tomorrow for a meeting. How about we grab a bagel someplace near Grand Central?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I hadn’t been aware of being homesick, so I was surprised at how thrilled I was to be back in Boulder.

  When I walked in the door of my house after my extended sojourn in New York the three dogs greeted me like a returning hero—for about ten minutes. At that point they realized that it was I who had deserted them. They cut the celebratory dance short and began to mope, the two larger dogs choosing places to sleep so that their butts, and not their eyes, were turned in my direction.

  I knew from experience that the older two, the Bouvier and the miniature poodle, would come around again by their next meal. With the puppy, though—the new Havanese that Adrienne had given Jonas—I didn’t know what to expect. After the joy of my arrival home had subsided, she’d departed the herd and disappeared toward the master bedroom. For a few minutes I listened for sounds of mischief coming from that direction, but discerned nothing worrisome. I figured she had sacked out on the bed.

  Puppies sleep a lot. Although it had been a few years since we’d had one, that was what I remembered.

  My bagels-and-coffee breakfast meeting with Marty in Manhattan had been followed later the same day by dinner with Marty’s family in White Plains. Jonas was there with his cousin
s, whom he seemed to adore. Kim was a fine cook. I could tell she had gone to a lot of trouble preparing the meal.

  I’d taken the train to White Plains from Grand Central. Kim met me at the station in a Honda minivan that was—I couldn’t think of a better word—trashed. Toys, balls, snack residue, clothes—lots of clothes—shoes, old newspapers, homework papers, schoolbooks, an ironic copy of Real Simple.

  Kim seemed oblivious to the fact that she was driving Pigpen’s car around town.

  I pushed just enough stuff off the passenger seat to make room to sit. An accumulation of brown goo on the seat-belt latch worried me more than a little.

  Before dinner, Jonas and I took a long walk so that I would have a chance to convince myself that his heart wasn’t torn about what he had decided he wanted to do.

  At a chaotic bagel bar in Manhattan that morning Marty had told me that Jonas had concluded that he was okay in White Plains by himself for the remainder of his stay, and that he didn’t think he wanted to visit me in the city again.

  To give Marty credit—not my natural inclination—he had not been gloating while we had bialys and coffee in the city. Still, I told Marty I wanted to hear the news from Jonas.

  Marty invited me to dinner so I would have an opportunity to do just that.

  Five minutes into my walk with Jonas he told me I could go home to Boulder.

  The sentiment felt real. “You’re cool here?” I said. “You don’t think you want to come to the city again?”

  “I like it here. I can see you back home,” he said. “I’m having a good time.”

  He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.

  Jonas was kicking a rock about the size of a golf ball. Each swat carried it forward five or six feet. Just before he told me he’d see me in Boulder, he kicked it two or three times, skipping it forward more than ten feet each time.